I wanted to post this message to get everyone's thoughts on it. I like playing first person shooter games and on many of them a weapon calle the "rail gun" is indispensable. While scientists haven't invented a hand held rail gun yet, they have created a Large rail gun which they believe in the near future will be able to be used on battle ships. Click this link to check out the article and post your thoughts:http://science.howstuffworks.com/rail-gun.htm

A device that, while impressive, is a tad bit scary to me. The idea of a rail gun that can electromagnetically fire a projectile that fast is mind bending. Like a really cool cannon or something.

It would seem that their is a possibility the rail gun could also be used to launch aircraft into the sky or space ships into orbit. If the aircraft uses a scram jet engine, once it reaches about Mach 5 and enters the atmosphere, the engine should take over and begin taking in hydrogen from the atmosphere and using it as fuel.

The idea of launching a vehicle into orbit is a interesting one, but you have to remember if both rails aren't the exact same lenght, and if they both don't have the same electron flow the vehicle could slam out of control into the rail and explode. You have to remember the vehicle will move extremely fast.

I do believe however that such an idea if successfully implemented will make our conventional space program obsolete.